Somewhere Between Professional and Unprofessional is the Truth
Polite Teams Are Failing Teams
Many engineering leaders are obsessed with maintaining a sterile, perfectly sanitized environment. They want every discussion grounded exclusively in KPIs, objectives, and outcomes. They want “professionalism.”
But here is a hard truth you need to swallow: if your team is always perfectly polite and measured with you, they are probably hiding something.
Somewhere between professional and unprofessional communication lies the actual truth.
Let me explain.
Lately, I shared some news with my engineers: we might have to shut down access to their favorite IDE.
The reaction wasn’t a polite, “Let’s align on the business impact of this tooling shift.” It was heated. Some engineers dropped a few colorful words. Others half-joked that they’d start updating their resumes. Some bluntly told me that the company was shooting itself in the foot. “Are you joking, right?”
Honestly, a few years ago, such a reaction usually made me either upset or disappointed. Always asked myself, “Don’t they really see the big picture of this change?”
Today, it’s more of a relief.
Why? Because that raw, unfiltered frustration is the ultimate metric of psychological safety.
Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson discovered this years ago. When she first started studying medical teams in the 90s, she assumed teams with better dynamics would make fewer errors. When the data came back, she was horrified: the 'best' teams were reporting significantly more errors. It took her a while to realize she hadn't found a breakdown in teamwork; she had discovered psychological safety. The failing teams looked perfect on paper because they were terrified to speak up. The successful teams were messy because they felt safe enough to admit the truth without fear of punishment.
Read more here: The Intelligent Failure that Led to the Discovery of Psychological Safety
My engineers felt secure enough to look their Site Director in the eye and tell me exactly how stupid they thought the idea was. 🤷
Contrast that with a conversation I had recently with another manager, who came to me complaining about some feedback they’d received (I’m a dotted-line manager here). “This engineer from your site told me they are pissed off about the senior management’s latest decision. I think this is highly disrespectful and completely unprofessional.”
My response? “Maybe. But it’s also a sign they trust you.”
I told this manager the quiet part out loud: That engineer would never have spoken like that to the CEO or the CTO. They would have chosen the more dangerous path of remaining silent, bottling up their frustration, and quietly disengaging right up until the day they handed in their notice.
Andy Grove, the legendary CEO who built Intel, wrote the Silicon Valley bible on leadership, High Output Management.
He didn't just tolerate messy disagreements; he engineered his entire corporate culture around a concept he called 'constructive confrontation.' Intel actually required new employees to take classes on it. Grove demanded that people ferociously argue with one another over the work. He recognized a reality that modern management often forgets: high-tech environments require brutal honesty. In his eyes, prioritizing politeness and consensus over truth wasn't just unprofessional; it was a threat to the company's survival.
A side note on the book: At its core, High Output Management treats a company like a manufacturing plant and a manager like the engineer optimizing that plant.
Grove completely destroys the idea of the “individual contributor manager.” He replaces it with one cold, indisputable equation:
A manager’s output = the output of their team + the output of the neighboring teams they influence.
If your engineers are shipping slowly, building the wrong things, or bogged down in broken processes, your output is zero—no matter how many hours you worked or how many emails you sent.
A Slack prank
If you want proof of how messy, human behavior beats sterile corporate processes, look at the classic office prank: an engineer walks away from an unlocked laptop, and a teammate posts a ridiculous or shameful message on Slack on their behalf.
Honestly, I hate it. But let’s look at the mechanics under the hood: that one slightly unprofessional, embarrassing joke does more to enforce actual security habits—making sure people lock their screens—than a dozen sterile, mandatory, in-house infosec compliance forms. The messy, informal reality drives the actual outcome. The professional checklist just checks a box.
Yet, if you look at old, cold-style corporates, top managers remain completely detached from this reality. They sit in their ivory towers expecting everyone to be emotionless cogs. They worship cold data and numbers, ignore the friction of human feedback, and demand that all communication be sanitized before it reaches their desks.
As I’ve explored before regarding Westrum’s organizational culture, these are your classic Pathological and Bureaucratic environments. They value rules and turf over results, and the messenger is routinely shot.
But Generative cultures—the ones that actually innovate and win—focus on the mission. And the mission requires the unvarnished truth.
When you demand absolute professionalism at all times, you don’t eliminate the frustration, the risks, or the bad ideas. You just drive them underground. You trade the messy truth for a comfortable lie.